Officials set late November deadline for Obamacare website fixes

WASHINGTON — The government’s troubled health insurance website will be running smoothly for the “vast majority” of users by the end of November, administration officials said Friday, for the first time setting a public deadline for fixing the problematic centerpiece of President Obama’s healthcare law.

“Healthcare.gov is fixable,” Jeffrey Zients, an economic advisor brought in to manage the repair project, told reporters on Friday. “It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed. But let me be clear. Healthcare.gov is fixable.”

Zients announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had hired a general contractor to manage the troubleshooting. QSSI Inc., a unit of United HealthGroup and one of three major contractors on the project, will take over the job from CMS, which has been criticized as in over its head in trying to manage the complicated project.

CMS spokeswoman Julie Baitille said the agency was modifying an existing contract to expand QSSI’s duties. She did not disclose the estimated cost of the work.

Administration officials have been scrambling to fix and explain the many problems with the site that determines if consumers are eligible for tax credits and connects them with affordable health insurance plans. Since its Oct.1 rollout, the site has shut out millions of users, thanks to a broken registration system and problems with the application function.

A late November target date for repairs is slightly sooner than some had predicted. Contractors who worked on the site told lawmakers on Thursday that they believed it could be functioning well by Dec. 15, the last day consumers can enroll for coverage than begins Jan. 1.

The deadline for signing up for insurance without a penalty is March 31, officials said.

Zients told reporters that a review of the site’s problems turned up a list of “dozens” of unresolved issues dealing with both functionality and performance of the site. At the top of the list is a problem with garbled and incorrect data being sent to insurers, he said.

QSSI would take the lead in working through the list, he said.

“There will be a relentless focus on speed and execution to work through the punch list,” he said.

The White House called in Zients, a former chief executive and government efficiency expert, to conduct the review and chart a plan for repairs. Zients would not disclose detail of the data turned up in his review, but acknowledged that in the very first days of the rollout, “very few” people could create accounts on the site. After three weeks of repairs, “We’re now at 90%” of users can create accounts,” he said.

The next phase of the process — the application that determines eligibility for tax credits — remains “volatile,” he said. At times fewer than one-third of users could get through the application process, he said. CMS officials say a total of 700,000 applications have been completed. Roughly one-half of those were submitted through the federal exchange, the other half through state-run marketplaces.

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